I Know a Spot

At Allen Acres B&B, you can rest, research, and reawaken

by

In hindsight, the moth wishes he’d eaten more in his carefree caterpillar days. Salads of sweet gum leaves for breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and midnight snack had seemed filling in the moment. He’d certainly felt queasy spinning round and round to form his silk cocoon. But then he emerged, and he had no mouth. Would one more medley of leaves have hurt? With a slight upcharge for added bacon?

The moth sets aside his regrets. He has one week left to live, and in that time must find a mate. They will not kiss—see above, re: vestigial mouth—but the good family name will carry on.

I meet him through his longest legacy, a photograph. He’s lime-green with little eyespots on his comblike wings. He’s called the luna moth, now living in an album alongside 880 other moth species who’ve fluttered through Allen Acres.

I knew little about the moth and less about his digestion before I went to this unrestrained nature preserve in West Louisiana, where enthusiasm for the environment is stoked at every turn. Here the titular and renowned Dr. Charles Allen, author of a dozen books and identifier of some fifty thousand species, has planted his twenty-six-acre property with bait for moths and butterflies: spicebush and sassafras, milkweed and lantana, rhododendron and Mexican sunflower. The insects hide in tall stands of yellow wild indigo or float down onto a zinnia’s wide bloom.

I meet him through his longest legacy, a photograph. He’s lime-green with little eyespots on his comblike wings. He’s called the luna moth, now living in an album alongside 880 other moth species who’ve fluttered through Allen Acres.

Hobbyist humans arrive in their fluttered wakes and can make camp in a five-room lodge shaded by a glorious buckeye tree that collects hummingbirds. There are valuable classes on plant identification, goofy and gaudy art installations stacked among the trees (e.g. a “Hurricane Warning System” of rusted farm tools dangling from wire), International Moth Week as a grand annual fete, and happy hosts always ready for the smallest of small talk.

[Read about folk artist Church Goin' Mule's experience communing with nature at Twelve Oaks artist retreat here.]

With my husband and two young children, I spent an April weekend at Allen Acres. We tailed an edible plants class ‘til they steeped fresh-plucked clover for tea, and wound our own way through the trails and into the nearby Kistachie National Forest too. My field notes follow.

Seen:

Gold light on pine trees, lamp light on white sheets

I haven’t slept much this year. At home, when I’m up at five am with the baby, I stare at the glow of my phone. At Allen Acres, the sky’s still gray when I walk out of the lodge for a morning amble. From the porch, I see a lamplight in the distance, bathing a blank white sheet—a sign with no letters. I find more stationed along the trail. These are not roach motels or fly traps but photobooths. The moth is drawn in and the naturalists tiptoes up with a camera. The sun rises and wrestles its way through the close-knit trees as I walk the dewy trail. I meet one of our fellow guests, a teenager traveling with her parents and sisters. She got up earlier than I did to hunt moths in the moonlight.

[Read about the grand old live oak trees of Acadiana here.]

Her cheeks are patched with red and her dark hair curls at the temple as she rushes up to her dad on the porch. She spotted the leopard moth, she tells him, but not the Io moth she hoped for. “Ooh, there’s your hummingbird,” she says to him. I turn in time to catch a blur, the red birdfeeder still swinging.

Her cheeks are patched with red and her dark hair curls at the temple as she rushes up to her dad on the porch. She spotted the leopard moth, she tells him, but not the Io moth she hoped for. “Ooh, there’s your hummingbird,” she says to him. I turn in time to catch a blur, the red birdfeeder still swinging.

Heard:

Airplanes, chickens clucking to Jefferson Airplane

Fort Polk is sixteen miles away from the B&B, in Leesville. The occasional training jet overhead drowns out birdsong in the woods. In the faded barn, behind the chicken coop, a boombox blares Jefferson Airplane with their 1967 hit, “White Rabbit.” Grace Slick sings:

And if you go chasing rabbits

And you know you’re going to fall,

Tell ‘em a hookah smoking caterpillar

Has given you the call

Felt:

A camera strap and baby carrier around my neck, no ant bites

Carting kids into the country edges their literature out of agrarian fantasy and into the real world. “Look, Mae, a barn, like from the hit book Big Red Barn!” Mae, not yet four, kneels into the grass to photograph a pretty flower, then fiddles with the buttons on her pink camera until a “Happy Halloween” frame appears. The baby, buckled against my body, dangles her feet and points up at a pine tree. I oblige with my own picture.

I’ve never visited the Kistachie, Louisiana’s 604,000-acre national forest. We’re at the southwestern edge here and have to duck inside. At the Little Cypress Recreational Complex, one of a handful of recreation areas nearby but the only one not closed by hurricane damage, we hike a half-mile loop while Mae shouts back warnings of ant piles. There’s a playground, and the baby takes her first slide, looking like a logjam, laughing her head off.

Carting kids into the country edges their literature out of agrarian fantasy and into the real world. “Look, Mae, a barn, like from the hit book Big Red Barn!” Mae, not yet four, kneels into the grass to photograph a pretty flower, then fiddles with the buttons on her pink camera until a “Happy Halloween” frame appears.

Smelled:

Primrose, clover, buckeye, honeysuckle

You really have to nose up to some of these plants to inhale their full aroma. This is where wings and a weight of maybe-an-ounce can help. I’m not the audience for the vast plantings in the meadows and prairie, but I imagine myself lighter here and maybe it’s the power of positive thinking, but I feel it too. What are your dreams when a zinnia is your pillow?

Tasted:

Chinese food, yard eggs

Allen Acres reserves plenty of hospitality for humankind. We have lunch in the main house, where Dr. Allen’s wife, Susan, is cooking up a feast. The tables in the front room are lain with leaves, but these are for the edible plants class to enjoy. (I steal a look at the cards: mugwort, hawksbeard, mouse-eared chickweed. I failed at vegetable gardening last summer, but maybe the real salads were in my yard all along.)

[Read about a stay in the B&B Capital of Texas here.]

We’re treated just as fine, with sweet-and-sour pork, fried chicken, and broccoli salad. The morning brings yard eggs from the noisy chickens (try psychedelic rock instead of hormones for the best yolks). We munch biscuits spread with jam, as Dr. Allen gets comfortable in an armchair and schools us with a few dozen facts about entomology, clicking through his PowerPoints.

We’re treated just as fine, with sweet-and-sour pork, fried chicken, and broccoli salad. The morning brings yard eggs from the noisy chickens (try psychedelic rock instead of hormones for the best yolks).

Known:

Plant names, insect features, roadside wonder

The names of these insects! Their patterned bodies and strange, short lives! Here’s what they eat, how they’re spotted, where they’re spotted. Emerald, horsehead, viceroy, and queen. I buy one of Dr. Allen’s books, on wildflowers, and don’t leave without an autograph.

And Allen Acres’ leaves its own signature on me. As we head back down the highway, I see a spiky purple plant in the ditch that never would have caught my eye before or at least wouldn’t keep my attention. A thistle, the guidebook tells me. It’s a springtime eruption. With salt and patient peeling, you can eat it. Suddenly, I see them, tall and unwieldy and odd, for miles out my moving window. I yell out each sighting. Thistle! Thistle! This’ll be a wider world from now on. 

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